How do you take a great RPG, dumb it down, and make the once great bland and ordinary? You make Fable 3.
In a word, the game can be described by simply uttering a simple sentence, a lesson if you will that both Lionhead and Peter Molyneux should learn well: DUMBING DOWN is not the same as STREAMLINING.
Graphically, Albion is as beautiful and vibrant as ever, and by "as ever", I mean as beautiful and vibrant as Fable II. That's not necessarily a bad thing, mind you, as Fable II looked like a storybook come to life. Fable III is no exception to that. The environments are as lovely and lush as one expects. Though there has been little improvement over its predecessor, they at least made the PC version look slightly better than the console version, no doubt thanks to its lengthy delay in release.
Sadly however, Lionhead Studios made a huge mistake in terms of graphics…in an effort to 'streamline' the game, and in so doing meet the (quite absurd) vision of a HUD-less screen spewed forth by Peter Molyneux, they neglected to put in a minimap…relying instead on the classic 'trail of golden bread crumb' introduced in the first game, for you to get around. The lack of a map however forces you to use the full-sized map, which, in a word, is absolute ABYSMAL. It is a stylized rendition of the area, where no d*mn thing seems to be in its right place. I cannot recall any map in any game in the past ten years that is so HORRIBLY DONE. To make matters worse, travel using the map can only be described as awkward. You can fast travel to a specific building, but sometimes it lands you "nearby" instead. The game offers you a choice to fast travel to the spawn point nearest your quest, but this is a busted and poorly implemented mechanism. In a quest that requires you to go to Brightwall Academy, selecting the fast travel option by selecting the quest might land you on the otherside of Brightwall Bridge outside the town----on the OPPOSITE END of the map. Yet there is obviously a spawn point nearer the Academy, as selecting the Brightwall Academy per se allows you to be teleported straight INSIDE it. Sure, you can do that yourself, but why put the option to teleport to the "nearest" fast travel point if it doesn't work?
That said, even your pathfinding is sometimes busted. You can follow your golden trail of breadcrumbs straight into a door (for example, of said Brightwall Academy), yet the quest you're doing prompts you to look for a criminal somewhere in Brightwall village, outside the Academy, making the quest impossible to complete.
Real estate management in the console was absolutely horrible, as maintaining your properties meant you either had to visit each one individually to maintain their upkeep costs, or do so via the map, which was slightly faster but no less tedious. Fortunately they included a "repair all" function in the PC release. THAT, my dear LS and Molyneux, is STREAMLINING. Which is exactly the opposite of what they did for the rest of the game.
The gameplay on the PC version fares slightly better than its console counterparts. Combat is tighter, enemies are a bit tougher and seemingly more aggressive, encouraging you to rethink the classic "fry everything with lightning" mentality that has made combat in both Fable II and III a relative cakewalk, but it is still rather easy.
But here is where it gets absolutely ridiculous. The weapons in Fable III number over 50 (51 I believe), but the maximum you ever encounter is 26 in a single-player game, which in my opinion is absolute codswallop. To make matters worse, in order to upgrade some weapons, you NEED to play multiplayer games, which again, is STUPID. Multiplayer is fine, and ultimately, it can only enrich any gaming experience, but that said, a game should, AT MOST, encourage or reward you for going multiplayer, rather than LIMIT the single-player experience. It frustrates me to no end that idiots like those at Lionhead feel that just because a game CAN be multiplayer it SHOULD be. If the game had exclusive items for multiplayer, I wouldn't have minded. Those items are multiplayer items, and are therefore REWARDS for playing multiplayer. But to actually limit the collectible content of a game to half of what you can collect simply because you're going solo, that is going too far. REWARD multiplayer, don't LIMIT single-player.
Fable III's story fares a little better. It's certainly nothing ground-breaking or earth-shattering, and don't expect Shakespeare. Fable has never truly taken itself seriously, and it can be called anything but hardcore. The game never goes more than 30 seconds without trying to throw a joke or obscure reference to chickens at your face, and though it can get pretty tiresome at times, and in many occasions the game thinks itself far funnier than it actually is, the mood is kept light and never too dark. For that same reason, however, there never really is a true connection between characters.
That being said, Fable III has never been known for its deep characters or the bonds you form with them. But there were always one or two characters that stood out, that made you genuinely feel for them to a certain extent. The original Fable has your family, and Fable II had your faithful dog. Fable III tries to do the same by adding a couple of NPC's that you supposedly have a deep connection with, but even this is handled in a lacklustre fashion. Your trusty companions are static. Your relationship with them never changes. Even though they are clearly against tyranny and oppression at the beginning of the game, they stick with you throughout the entire thing, even if you choose to become evil yourself. Despite this, your relationship with them is an attempt to show a deeper connection between your character and the world around him/her, which is poorly done, but worthy of some note, considering it is Fable, after all.
Even your dog is little more than a living metal detector, pointing you to treasure and dig spots…and apparently, he's low on batteries. I don't know how, but Lionhead managed to make the dog WORSE at his job than the furry lovable companion of Fable II. In Fable III, he gets stuck on corners, points in the direction of treasure already looted, and generally annoys the hell out of you. I was actually able to watch for ten minutes and thirty-two seconds, (YES I TIMED IT), when after approaching a known dig spot in an alleyway of Bowerstone on my second playthrough, my dog barked, the dig spot icon floating on top of his head, and then get stuck on the corner leading into the alleyway, where he jittered for thirty seconds, ran ACROSS the entrance, and then get stuck on the OTHER corner of the alleyway. The process repeated itself until I screamed in the face of my monitor (as you can't dig without the d*mn mutt pointing out the spot to you) and finally gave up and walked away to try another time. Apparently, royal pets are dumber than those raised on the streets, since I don't recall having such problems with Fable II's canine companion.
Speaking of NPC's, we come to what is perhaps the strangest and probably most IDIOTIC thing that Lionhead and Peter Molyneux did. And nowhere in the game should the statement "DUMBING DOWN is not the same as STREAMLINING" apply more than here. The PC's relationship with the NPC's of Albion in any Fable game had always been…well, the words shallow and non-existent come to mind. In Fable III, the problem is even worse. In previous incarnations of the game, your PC could at least CHOOSE what the bloody hell he wanted to do. Talk, shake hands, hug, kiss, dance. Not so in Fable III.
Whether it was the decision of Peter Molyneux or some other dumb*ss at Lionhead, when you interact with an NPC you can only do one good, one evil, one rude, and one funny interaction at any one time. So if you're stuck with the DANCE interaction, it may not be so bad if you're dancing with your wife and then lifting her up into the air or spinning her and gently kissing her hand, but WTF, I'd rather not bloody do that to the blacksmith or the old man running the bloody potion shop. That's right. Want a discount at the blacksmith's? You have to dance and kiss him on the hand or lift him up into the bloody air. D*mn ridiculous. This is idiocy at its height. Instead of streamlining or simplifying the interactions, LS and Molyneux managed to actually DUMB DOWN something that, let's face it, was pretty much devoid of depth to begin with. They made something inherently shallow and stupid even more shallow and more stupid. BRAVO.
And for so much time that they spent rambling on and on about the ability to Hold Hands…the bloody system has more quirks and annoyances than one could dare to imagine. An NPC can easily be left behind just by going up a flight of stairs. Try leading them through a crowd and you'll lose them for sure. Even when you're bloody walking. Maybe Molyneux and Lionhead should have just let go of the idea and made normal interaction available.
Perhaps, in an even greater effort to show players how much people don't actually matter in Fable III, the developers decided to create spawnpoints for two groups of enemies in the middle of one of the areas in Fable III, called Millfields, where all the mansions are located, and where the residents are either nobles or servants. For some reason beyond my understanding, the developers decided to place the spawnpoints of these enemies on the two busiest road crossings in the area, resulting in a high rate of death of NPC's. If your spouse and home happen to be here, don't be surprised to find your house empty…or to actually see your spouse torn to shreds by balvarines or chopped down by mercenaries. It doesn't make any sense. If all the mansions are there, wouldn't the security of the area be higher? Why do ten balvarines suddenly jump out in the middle of Albion's richest district?
Morality, which plays a very important part in any modern RPG, is likewise thrown out the window. Yes, you can be evil, but in the context of the game, you're being evil to be good. Does that make sense? No, not really. Going through the game will make you understand what I mean, but it is generally understood that the decisions you make in the game are either good, because you are good yourself, or "evil" because you are trying to prevent an even greater evil, and one that is so obscurely explained and so suddenly introduced mid-game that it makes you wonder where it came from (this isn't answered by the way---all you know is that it's coming).
The game rushes through the "second half" of its campaign, which isn't really a half, but more like a sixth of the actual game, forcing you to undergo event after event in a rushed and sloppily done manner, and though there are several warnings for you that you must prepare for the final battle, it isn't really clear until the very battle itself that the end is at hand, which may catch some players by surprise. The game tells you there are more than a hundred days left to the final battle during which time you can prepare, but you wake up after the last decision of the day to find that the finale is upon you.
Again, Fable III isn't a bad game, but it seems that Lionhead and Peter Molyneux have lost grasp of several things that make an RPG game great.
If a Fable IV is ever under development, they should learn a lesson or two from Fable III, since they seemed to pick up all the wrongs ones from Fable II.
1) Relationships matter. Even if you want to make it incredibly simple and shallow, for christ's sake, don't force a player to dance or hug someone he/she doesn't want to just so they can be friends. A d*mn handshake will suffice.
2) Don't limit the single-player campaign. Fact is many hardcore RPG players are solo players, sometimes because other people can be such douchebags. If you want to give multiplayer players more stuff, go ahead, but don't offer the complete game only to those who play multiplayer. Give them rewards or incentives for going online to play with friends, but don't restrict what single-player gamers can get.
3) Fix the d*mn dog. Seriously.
4) MAPS ARE ESSENTIAL MOLYNEUX. If you don't want it clogging up the screen then for god's sake do the full pull-out map PROPERLY. And for the sake of all that is holy, put a freakin' marker so we know where we are on it, instead of little moving people that don't represent anything.
5) MORALITY matters. If you're going to make a game with "morality", make sure you know what you're doing. Choices should matter.
The rest is just common sense (something which apparently people at Lionhead---or maybe just Molyneux, lack). For example, why have a bloody chest that gives obscene amounts of money available after the final showdown, when money is no longer needed at that point? Shouldn't it be made available BEFORE said showdown, when it actually matters?
Fable III isn't an awful game, but it is a disappointing one. Sad to think that even with all the time they had to tweak the game before its PC release, Lionhead still got sooo many things wrong. It is even a greater disappointment that, when comparing it to the original game, Fable III is graphically superior only because it came at a later date, but the story is weaker, the characters more forgettable, the relationships more shallow, and the climax and final battle weaker (though thankfully, not as weak as Fable II's final battle).
It's unfortunate that Albion's world, which is vibrant and colourful and filled with charming (if forgettable) characters, and ripe with opportunities for grand adventures and stories, could be so haphazardly done in by such annoyances.
Every attempt at 'streamlining' by Molyneux and company ended up making the game incredibly dumb or frustrating, or both. That's not to say that all the changes were bad, mind you. The Sanctuary was a novel idea and a great touch, but in the glaring and overwhelming sea of oddities and idiocy at how the most basic elements of the game were handled from the world map that just looks stupid and the dog that can't even negotiate a simple corner (hint to dog: go around it…not through it) to the seemingly rushed endgame and the dumbed down interaction with the world's NPC's…such innovations and the natural charm of the world of Albion are easily lost.
This remains a fun game, mind you, nothing changes that. But it could have been so much more. The disappointment here is not that the developers failed to make a great game…it's that they already had a wonderful formula to work with in Fable, and yet they continue to focus on all the wrong things which end up backfiring, such as developing a HUD-less screen but screwing up the map, or introducing a mechanic that isn't all that innovative and dumbing down all other related mechanics in the process, such as making a stupid hold hands mechanic which doesn't even work all too well then forcing you to romantically dance with every single NPC you come across. (really? leading a criminal by holding his hand through town? REALLY?)
It's time Lionhead and Molyneux looked at what made Fable such a great RPG, and forget what THEY think should make a great RPG…since they obviously keep getting it wrong. Great story, lovable characters, and awesome and epic gameplay made Fable great. And it did it without the hero every having to dip the blacksmith in an awkward dance, hold someone's hand, and he even managed to do it with a minimap that worked, and saved the world without a dog, and GASP, without multiplayer as well. Here's a hint to Molyneux: Fable was great for a reason. Instead of trying to introduce new mechanics that don't significantly make the the game better, try to capture that which made the original great in the first place.
Time to get back to basics.